Colder here. December 6, 2011. Day three in India, first day at placement. We drove thirty minutes away from our flats, passed laborers in colorful silks and cottons waiting to be picked up from work, past bony cows eating trash and past torn posters and billboards on dimpled tin walls. We turned into a large tract of land in the middle of Delhi, where the smog still seeps in but flowers of gold and pink and orange line the road, vines hanging between columns and fields of vegetables in parallel and perpendicular lines. We walked into Mother Teresa's Home for the Dying and Destitute, anxious and excited and scared and wishful and all the other adjectives fluttering around in heart and stomach. A large walkway goes straight through the nearly all outdoor center, men on the left, women on the right, Lalet, one of the staff members for CCS, told us. We hear crying, screaming and sobbing and little laughter, and we scuff across the tiles, and meet the mother nun, patients coming us to us and talking grunts or Hindi or babble, indiscernible to me, and all around there are women and men in various states of mental chaos and I don't think I can do this, but I must, I say to myself, I must.
And so in my new Indian dress that we are required to wear, a pale green silky tunic, I sit with the women for hours, and hold their hands, and rub their backs when they cry and almost cry myself.
Mother Teresa's center in New Delhi is a recent institution that takes men and women with either physical or mental disabilities and gives them a place to stay, food to eat, comfort, and maybe even love, until they die.
Most do not have family. I would be surprised to see you not shocked, Bella said.
The light streams down allies at steep angles, hitting the garbage and curbs through refractions of smog. Birds chirp all night, and fly overhead from palm to tree to wire to paint chipped balcony. I sit in our living room, peering out through barred windows and cracked screens and I watch from the backseat of our compact car at the fruit stands and cloth shops and toothless men crossing the road, motorbikes tearing past and automated rickshaws scurrying in cracks of fast moving exhaust.
I miss Tanzania, my children, my coffee shop and laundry buckets. Here is foreign, still, unknown. I cough and I miss the clean air and I miss the sweat and the oppressive heat and the classrooms with no textbooks and part of me wonders why I'm here.
I can't imagine being anywhere else, but here, on this wide golden couch, legs perched on a glass coffee table.
"In this life, we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love."-Mother Teresa
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